Court to investigate farmers' claims

VILNIUS (ELTA) - The Higher Administrative Court of Lithuania plans
to get down to investigation of the first bunch of farmers'
complaints, filed en masse, on Feb. 29. The other cases will be dealt
with in March.

In November and December, the Lithuanian farmers, infuriated by
defaulted payments for delivered products, flooded the court in the
hope of getting promised state subsidies. The organizer of campaign,
Ramunas Karbauskis, chairman of Farmer Party, predicted then that
50,000 complaints would paralyze the court.

However, the chairman of court, Stasys Sedbaras, said the court
recorded 2,750 complaints which were consequently grouped by their
types and regions and classified into six actions. He hinted that
recently flowing complaints would form one or two actions, but there
would be no thousands. Sedbaras was cited as saying the court
received 5,000 complaints, but the bigger part was returned to the
authors because of inaccuracies and mistakes, but few corrected
papers came back to the court.

Nevertheless, the court spent some 10,000-12,000 litas for
correspondence with farmers. All plaintiffs indicated the same
requirement, that the court direct the agriculture ministry to issue
an order on payment of subsidies, but did not specify sums.

As of December, the processing firms, mainly dairies and meat plants,
and those buying up agricultural products owed farmers 236 million
litas.